


Icing Conditions

by Pteropoda (SilentP)



Series: You and You and I [3]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Gen, M/M, Multi, serious discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 15:10:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4526847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentP/pseuds/Pteropoda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being a worry-wart about ice on his wings is one of those things about Thundercracker that Skywarp always took for granted, but a mistake and a mountain teach him a little about why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Icing Conditions

**Author's Note:**

> A little more than a month back, I asked for people to send me fic requests, and the first one I got asked me to expand on one of Skywarp's comments in Party of Three, about Thundercracker "abusing the de-icing fluid." It was probably supposed to be silly, but then I wrote it and it turned into this again. 
> 
> The unedited version is posted to tumblr, but I thought I'd put the final product here.

“If I say I told you so, will you listen to me next time?”

“Shut up,” Skywarp grumbled. He tried and failed to extend his landing gear one last time, growling when the ice and snow beneath him stopped the attempt. “Just get over here and help me, will ya?” he demanded, wriggling his flaps in frustration.

The snow caved around his nosecone muffled his senses, but Skywarp faintly heard the sound of transformation then the crunching of pedes on snow, then finally felt Thundercracker’s hands grabbing onto his wings and pulling. Skywarp yelped, but the extra assistance was enough to drag his nosecone out of the pile of snow and give him the space to transform. He grumbled as the cold seeped into his transformation joints, and began methodically testing the range of his limbs.

Thundercracker sighed, but stepped back to give him space. “Any damage alerts?” he asked when Skywarp had finally tested everything and gone instead to scowling at the trench left by his crash.

“Nothing major,” Skywarp said. “My nosecone got jammed, there’s ice in my joints, blah blah, I crashed on a snowy mountain, of course there is.” He set his turbines to spinning and his flight engines to an idle in an attempt to melt some of the snow and ice off.

“Good,” Thundercracker said, then whacked him.

“Ouch!” Skywarp yelped indignantly. He turned, ready to give his trinemate a piece of his mind, only to find Thundercracker glaring at him. “Hey, what was that for?”

“What wasn’t it for?” Thundercracker growled. “You idiot, you just plowed yourself into a mountain because you were too busy turning tricks to notice where you were going! I told you mountains were dangerous, and I told you we’d be going high up, and you didn’t bother to listen. I even told you not to go through those clouds, and you went through more!”

“Because you worry too much,” Skywarp pouted.

“And you don’t worry enough,” Thundercracker retorted. “You’re lucky I’m here. What would you have done if you got buried beneath an avalanche?”

“That didn’t happen!” Skywarp protested.

“But it could have!” Thundercracker shouted. Actually shouted. Skywarp stopped in his tracks. Thundercracker didn’t _get_ this worked up. When he was mad, he went silent, or his turbines started up an ominous rumbling. It was nothing like this, the shouting and the whirring vents and the overbright optics, and Skywarp’s irritation dissolved into a wave of concern.

“TC?” Skywarp asked, voice small.

Thundercracker flinched and took a step back, casting his optics around to find anything other than Skywarp to look at. “Sorry, Warp. Sorry. I…. Sorry.”

“You don’t get like this,” Skywarp said worriedly, stepping forward. “TC, what’s going on?”

“It’s nothing,” Thundercracker said, but he let Skywarp grab his hands and bully him closer. “It’s stupid.”

“Well yeah,” Skywarp said, prompting an inelegant snort from Thundercracker, “but it’s got you all twitchy anyway. You owe it to me to at least say why. C’mon,” he coaxed. “You’re the one who’s always talking about that… that _conflict resolution_ slag.”

Skywarp didn’t get an answer for several tense moments. Thundercracker was staring down at the compacted snow beneath their feet, his wings twitching in the way that Skywarp knew meant he was yelling at himself in his head. “Yeah, all right,” Thundercracker said finally, shoulders hunched.

Still, he cycled air through his vents before he began to speak. “I was made around the Manganese Mountains, right?”

“Uh-huh,” Skywarp said slowly. He couldn’t see the connection, but Thundercracker must have caught his stride, because the words began to pour out of him.

“The atmosphere around there has a lot of dihydrogen monoxide, for some reason. Starscream could probably say why. Something about the peaks interrupting the jet stream… it made for tricky winds, anyway. But the water would collect in the air above the Manganese Mountains, and there would be deposits of the liquid and solid forms further up, so mechs would go there to harvest it for solvent, sometimes. Anyway, I didn’t care about the harvesting so much. I was just a courier who had to fly over the mountains every few orns.”

“So what does slagging water collecting have to do with anything?” Skywarp asked.

“There were always clouds up there, and it would collect on your wings and start to ice them over when you went through. The only way to avoid the clouds was to fly low, and the peaks were too jagged to do that,” Thundercracker said. “Then if you flew too high, the air got too thin, and you’d ice over anyway. Besides, the longer a courier takes, the less they get paid, and that meant going high wasn’t an option anyway. So the clouds reduced visibility, and sometimes the ice would get too heavy, or freeze my flaps.” he tapped at Skywarp’s wing, “As you just discovered, it makes it really slagging hard to pull up quickly when you need to.”

“So- what, you crashed?” Skywarp asked, understanding dawning.

“Yeah,” Thundercracker said quietly. “Only I didn’t have any extra fuel— you know, courier frames, they had us fly light to keep our efficiency high. And I didn’t have anyone with me. So I got stuck.”

“Under an avalanche,” Skywarp guessed, and Thundercracker shuddered.

“Under an avalanche,” he whispered. “If there hadn’t been some harvesters in the area who saw it, I’d have gone empty up there.”

Skywarp fidgeted uncomfortably. There was a pressure in his spark that tightened when Skywarp thought about TC stranded there, alone and frozen over, that made him look around the mountains they stood on and shudder. He ignored it stubbornly. It hadn’t happened, and it wasn’t going to happy. Thundercracker was way too cautious for it. “So that’s why you always act like we’re about to go to the arctic whenever we get up high,” he teased.

“Yeah,” Thundercracker huffed. “That’s why. Maybe next time you’ll actually follow my example.”

“Well I’m not going to paint myself with the stuff the way you do,” Skywarp scoffed. “But maybe you have a good idea.” He mustered a grin and nudged Thundercracker in the side. “Now c’mon, fire up your turbines and help me melt all of this ice off so I can transform properly. Just because we can fly in root mode doesn’t mean I want to fly like a snail! Let’s get off this stupid human mountain.”

He turned his most winning smile on Thundercracker, and for the first time since they’d come close to this stupid mountain, Thundercracker smiled weakly back.


End file.
